Kinetic Art

   Kinetic art explores how things look when they move and refers mostly to sculptured works, made up of parts designed to be set in motion by an internal mechanism or an external stimulus, such as light or air. The movement is not virtual or illusory, but a real movement that might be created by a motor, water, wind or even a button pushed by the viewer. Over time, kinetic art developed in response to an increasingly technological culture.


The expression Kinetic Art was used from the mid-1950s onward. It referred to an international trend followed by artists such as Soto, Takis, Agam and Schoffer. Some Kinetic artists also worked in the field of Op Art. Their works were influenced by a modernist aesthetic and could be made with contemporary materials (e.g., aluminum, plastic, neon). Most kinetic works were moving geometric compositions. In Italy artists belonging to Gruppo N, founded in Padua in 1959 (including Biasi, Costa and Massironi, among others), carried out experiments with light, projections and reflections associated with movement.

The members of the French group GRAV, which included Le Parc, Morellet and Sobrino and was established in 1960's in Paris, created optical and kinetic environments that disturbed and interfered with meanings and relations to space.


   The term kineticism broadened the concept of Kinetic Art to all artistic works involving movement, without any reference to a specific aesthetics. It applies to all those artists today who work with any kind of movement, rather than only geometric art. 


Artist => Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing abstract sculptures he called "mobiles". In addition to mobile and "stabile" sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.

Minimal Art

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s






In contrast with Abstract Expressionism and its impulsive and gestural expression of the unconsciousness, Minimal artists focused on material aesthetics, the relationship of objects to space, the effects of light, and producing highly reduced arrangements.


Donald Judd (1928-94) followed these basic principles, arranging coloured aluminium boxes in different ways, above, or next to one another. Carl Andre (born 1935) stacked rectangular wooden pegs on top of each other, or in a row. Dan Flavin (1933-96) created subtle light spaces with evenly laid out neon tubes. Minimalism also had an impact on dance and music in the 1960s. Minimalist principles also influenced artistic phenomenon such as Land Art, Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. 


Much of Minimalist aesthetics was shaped by a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Minimalists wanted to remove suggestions of self-expressionism from the art work, as well as evocations of illusion or transcendence - or, indeed, metaphors of any kind, though as some critics have pointed out, that proved difficult. Unhappy with the modernist emphasis on medium-specificity, the Minimalists also sought to erase distinctions between paintings and sculptures, and to make instead, as Donald Judd said: "specific objects."


Artist => Donald Judd

Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928 – February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism (a term he nonetheless stridently disavowed). In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created an outpouring of seemingly effervescent works that defied the term "minimalism". Nevertheless, he is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism," and its most important theoretician through such seminal writings such as "Specific Objects" (1964).

Hard-Edge

Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. 


Hard-edge painting is a tendency in late 1950s and 1960s art that is closely related to Post-painterly abstraction and color field painting. It describes an abstract style that combines the clear composition of geometric abstraction with the intense color and bold, unitary forms of color field painting. Although it was first identified with Californian artists, today the phrase is used to describe one of the most distinctive tendencies in abstract painting throughout the United States in the 1960s.


Although the four artists included in Langsner's show were very different, they were united by their use of clean, lucid composition, intense color, and lack of surface incident. They were also influenced by the sense of "wholism," or single, unitary composition, seen in the work of Barnett Newman and other color field painters. Hard-edge abstraction differed greatly from its popular predecessor, action painting, in that the artists applied their paints very carefully and sought to avoid any suggestion of spirituality or soulful expression. Frank Stella is typical of those who might be described as hard-edge painters, and who sought to avoid the high-flown drama of action painting - like him, most felt that, by the mid 1950s, gestural abstraction becoming a manner that was being copied by legions of less talented followers, all of whom were pretending the anguish and existential insight.



Key Characteristics of Hard-Edge Painting:


Clean lines
Colorful geometric areas
Flat surface
The canvas/paper/print as a unit, a shape on the wall
Influenced by Synthetic Cubism, Park Avenue Cubism, de Stijl, Supremetism and Bauhaus.

Artist => Karl Benjamin 

(born December 29, 1925) is an American painter of vibrant geometric abstractions who rose to fame in 1959 as one of four Los Angeles-based Abstract Classicists and subsequently produced a critically acclaimed body of work that explores a vast array of color relationships. Working quietly at his home in Claremont, CA, he has developed a rich vocabulary of colors and hard-edge shapes in masterful compositions of tightly balanced repose or high-spirited energy. At once intuitive and systematic, the artist is, in the words of critic Christopher Knight, "a colorist of great wit and inventiveness."

Post Painterly Abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction is a broad term that encompasses a variety of styles which evolved in reaction to the painterly, gestural approaches of some Abstract Expressionists. Coined by Clement Greenberg, in 1964, it originally served as the title of an exhibition which included a large number of artists who were associated with various tendencies, including color field painting, hard-edge abstraction, and the Washington Color School. 

Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. 

As painting continued to move in different directions, initially away from abstract expressionism, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term "post-painterly abstraction", which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by minimalism, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, and color field painting.

Greenberg characterized post-painterly abstraction as linear in design, bright in color, lacking in detail and incident, and open in composition (inclined to lead the eye beyond the limits of the canvas). Most importantly, however, it was anonymous in execution: this reflected the artists' desire to leave behind the grandiose drama and spirituality of Abstract Expressionism.

Artist => Frank Stella
Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter and printmaker, significant in the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

Library Source ==>

 "Modernism's Masculine Subjects-Matisse, the New York School and Post-Painterly Abstraction" /Marcia Brennan 

"According to Greenberg, in contrast to the Parisian painters,
'The American version of Abstract expressionism is usually characterized, in failure as well as in success, by a fresher; more open, more immediate surface. Whether it is enamel paint reflecting light, or thinned paint soaked into unsized and unprimed canvas, the surface manages somehow to breathe. There is no insulating finish, nor is pictorial space created "pictorially" by deep or veiled color; it is a question rather of blunt and corporeal contrasts and of optical illusions difficult to specify. Nor is the picture "packaged", wrapped up and sealed in, to declare it as easel painting; the shape of the picture itself is treated less as a receptacle given in advance than as an open field whose unity must be permitted emerge instead of being imposed or forced upon it'
The critic contended that while the "new spontaneity and directness" of American abstract artworks may be difficult for audiences to accept, the best American painting successfully offer their viewers nothing other than "a plentitude of presence." "(pg 39 & 40)


"In 1964, Greenberg expanded on this theme, nothing in particular the ways in which "Helen Frankenthaler's soaking and blottings of paint... open rather than close the picture, and would do so even without the openness of her layout. Emphasizing the qualities of "lucidity" and "optical clarity", Greenberg wrote that the post-painterly abstractionists "shun thick paint and tactile effects. Some of them dilute their paint to an extreme and soak it into unsized and unprimed canvas (following Pollock's lead in his black and white paintings of 1951). In their reaction against the 'hand-writing' and 'gestures' of Painterly Abstraction, these artists also favor a relatively anonymous execution." By working through the formative influences of Pollock and Frankenthaler, Louis and Noland were characterized as having arrived at a type of painting that "conveys a sense not only of color as somehow disembodied, and therefore more purely optical, but also of color as a thing that opens ans expands the picture plane." Thus, in a reaction against the qualities of personalized gestural touch that distinguish later abstract  expressionism (now renamed "Painterly Abstraction"), post painterly abstraction was seen instead as characterized by a liquefying anonymity of touch, a physical openness and clarity of design, and a lucid opticality that issued from the paintings' "disembodied color." (pg 126)

Pop Art

The term first appeared in Britain during the 1950s and referred to the interest of a number of artists in the images of mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products. The 1950s were a period of optimism in Britain following the end of war-time rationing, and a consumer boom took place. Influenced by the art seen in Eduardo Paolozzi's 1953 exhibition Parallel between Art and Life at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and by American artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, British artists such as Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group aimed at broadening taste into more popular, less academic art. Hamilton helped organize the 'Man, Machine, and Motion' exhibition in 1955, and 'This is Tomorrow' with its landmark image Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing? (1956). Pop Art therefore coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 1950s and '60s, and became very much a part of the image of fashionable, 'swinging' London. Peter Blake, for example, designed album covers for Elvis Presley and the Beatles and placed film stars such as Brigitte Bardot in his pictures in the same way that Warhol was immortalizing Marilyn Monroe in the USA. Pop art came in a number of waves, but all its adherents - Joe Trilson, Richard Smith, Peter Phillips, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj - shared some interest in the urban, consumer, modern experience.


The origins of pop art in North America and Great Britain developed differently. In the United States, it marked a return to hard-edged composition and representational art as a response by artists using impersonal, mundane reality, irony and parody to defuse the personal symbolism and "painterly looseness" of Abstract Expressionism. By contrast, the origin in post-War Britain, while employing irony and parody, was more academic with a focus on the dynamic and paradoxical imagery of American popular culture as powerful, manipulative symbolic devices that were affecting whole patterns of life, while improving prosperity of a society. Early pop art in Britain was a matter of ideas fueled by American popular culture viewed from afar, while the American artists were inspired by the experience of living within that culture. Similarly, pop art was both an extension and a repudiation of Dadaism. While pop art and Dadaism explored some of the same subjects, pop art replaced the destructive, satirical, and anarchic impulses of the Dada movement with detached affirmation of the artifacts of mass culture. Among those artists seen by some as producing work leading up to Pop art are Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and Man Ray.

  



Although Pop Art began in the late 1950s, Pop Art in America was given its greatest impetus during the 1960s. By this time, American advertising had adopted many elements and inflections of modern art and functioned at a very sophisticated level. Consequently, American artists had to search deeper for dramatic styles that would distance art from the well-designed and clever commercial materials. As the British viewed American popular culture imagery from a somewhat removed perspective, their views were often instilled with romantic, sentimental and humorous overtones. By contrast, American artists being bombarded daily with the diversity of mass produced imagery, produced work that was generally more bold and aggressive.


Artist => Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States of America dedicated to a single artist.

Abstract Expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism. In the United States, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky.


Abstract Expressionism is a type of art in which the artist expresses himself purely through the use of form and color. It non-representational, or non-objective, art, which means that there are no actual objects represented.


A painting movement in which artists typically applied paint rapidly, and with force to their huge canvases in an effort to show feelings and emotions, painting gesturally, non-geometrically, sometimes applying paint with large brushes, sometimes dripping or even throwing it onto canvas. Their work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears to be accident and chance, but which is actually highly planned. Some Abstract Expressionist artists were concerned with adopting a peaceful and mystical approach to a purely abstract image. Usually there was no effort to represent subject matter. Not all work was abstract, nor was all work expressive, but it was generally believed that the spontaneity of the artists' approach to their work would draw from and release the creativity of their unconscious minds. The expressive method of painting was often considered as important as the painting itself.


Artist ==> In 1940, a young painter named Robert Motherwell came to New York City and joined a group of artists — including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline — who set out to change the face of American painting. These painters renounced the prevalent American style, believing its realism depicted only the surface of American life. Their interest was in exploring the deeper sense of reality beyond the recognizable image. Influenced by the Surrealists, many of whom had emigrated from Europe to New York, the Abstract Expressionists sought to create essential images that revealed emotional truth and authenticity of feeling.

Library Source: "Abstract Expressionism"/ David Anfam

" Abstract Expressionism is a landmark in the general history of art and of modern art in particular. Lİke the Cubist epoch it represents a revolutionary event which revises our view before and after. Only in this case even the modest historical distance separating us from those early years of the century is not yet available and what began with the rise of the movement shortly before the Second World War opens perspectives that enfold the present." (pg 7)

"Notoriosuly, modern artists tend to conflate private crises with outside events and the Abstract Expressionists were no exception. Yet the Second World War, the Fall of Paris on 14 June 1940, Pearl Harbor and its entire dreadful aftermath justified this. Still and Smith alone participated in war industries; no others even came near combat due to various disabilities and so they shared the dubious privileges of the bystander: remote from physical conflict amongst the Greenwich Village intelligentsia, they could simultaneously view global chaos from a vantage point and still be affected by the spreading psychic malaise." (pg 77)

Pittura Metafisica

Metaphysical art (Italian: Pittura metafisica), style of painting that flourished mainly between 1911 and 1920 in the works of the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico andCarlo Carrà. The movement began with Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality. De Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917.


While Futurism staunchly rejected the past, other modern movements identified a nostalgia for the now faded Classical grandeur of Italy as a major influence in their art. Giorgio de Chirico first developed the style that he later called Metaphysical Painting while in Milan. It was in the more sedate surroundings of Florence, however, that he subsequently developed his emphasis on strange, eerie spaces, based upon the Italian piazza. Many of de Chirico's works from his Florence period evoke a sense of dislocation between past and present, between the individual subject and the space he or she inhabits. These works soon drew the attention of other artists such as Carlo Carrà and Giorgio Morandi.

A fundamental feature of the Pittura Metafisica, in its literal sense, is the depiction of the object's "super-natural" features (Greek "metá" = beyond; "phýsis" = nature), the object's content beyond its visible features. These ideas had clearly been influenced by Giorgio de Chirico's younger brother Andrea, who was working as a writer and painter under the pseudonym Alberto Savinio. Philosophical concepts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer also occupied fundamental roles in this context.

The painters of the Pittura Metafisica created coulisse-like and perspectively exaggerated views that seemed like dreams filled with over-sharply modeled figures and objects, which have been taken from their original contexts and rearranged in new and strange relations. Man is also treated as an object - as "manichino", a faceless jointed doll, or as a construct of stereometric basic forms. Isolation, alienation, inexplicability and mysteriousness coin the atmosphere of the calm, motionless Pittura Metafisica that wanted to be less a way of painting than a means of observing. 

In their concept of materiality, but also in terms of style, the artists of the Pittura Metafisica referred to the solemn and strict austerity of the Early Renaissance (Giotto, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello). The simultaneosuly upcoming dynamic Futurism can be perceived as a counter movement to the Pittura Metafisica - Carlo Carrà, up until 1915 one of the leading artists of Futurism, explained his turn to the Pittura Metafisica with the rediscovery of the "principio italiano", which was prevailing in Renaissance.
The Pittura Metafisica had effects beyond the borders of Italy, especially on New Objectivity and Surrealism, which both came up up a little later. 


Artist => Giorgio de Chirico
De Chirico is best known for the paintings he produced between 1909 and 1919, his metaphysical period, which are memorable for the haunted, brooding moods evoked by their images. At the start of this period, his subjects were still cityscapes inspired by the bright daylight of Mediterranean cities, but gradually he turned his attention to studies of cluttered storerooms, sometimes inhabited by mannequin-like hybrid figures.

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings.

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Bretonwas explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.

Surrealism has come to be seen as the most influential movement in twentieth century art. Figures like Salvador Dalí and Man Ray not only had an important influence on avant-garde art, but through their commercial work - in fashion photography, advertising and film - they brought the style to a huge popular audience. Following the demise ofMinimalism in the 1960s, the movement's influence also returned to art, and since the 1970s it has attracted considerable attention from art historians.

Surrealism was officially founded in 1924, when André Breton wrote Le Manifeste du Surréalisme. In it, he defined Surrealism as "Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought." In this, he proposed that artists should seek access to their unconscious mind in order to make art inspired by this realm.Initially a literary movement, many Surrealists were ambivalent about the possibilities of painting, however, the group's leader, André Breton, later embraced and promoted painting. The work of Surrealist painters such as Joan Miró would be an important influence on the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s.

Artist => Salvador Dali

 

(Persistence of Memory)

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.

Library Source => "Surrealism and the Visual Arts-Theory and Reception"/ Kim Grant

"Breton situated the Surrealist project in the territory of the mind, and, more importantly, on the terrain of "real" mental functioning prior to rationality, morality, aesthetics, or practical application. This project is an attempt to capture and "express" thought prior to all imposed systems; fundementally, it is an effort to gain access to the true lyrical language. The ultimate goal, however, is not mere self-expression but the resolution of the "principal problems of life," the transformation of the world by resolving dream and reality into a surreality. It is this goal of transformation, the resolution of mind and matter, that will form the solid basis for a Surrealist theory of visual art." (pg 75-76)

"The Bulletin's description of Surreailst art as the naturalistic representation of heterogeneous objects reflected a theoretical understandingmore than a consideration of actual Surrealis works." (pg 174)

"The Surrealists' renewed dedication to the concrete transformation of reality evident in the Second Manifesto was reflected in their new review, Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution , which began publication in the summer of 1930. As its title indicates, Surrealism was now proposed as an instrument for revolution, a revolution that was by implication communist, but was in fact more properly conceived as a total reorganization of human reality. The review was even less like an art magazine in its appearance than its predecessor. It had very few images, and those it published were placed in the back of the issue rather than interspersed throughout the magazine as illustrations. Only one painting was partially reproduced in the first issue, Dali's invisible Man, which served as a demonstration of Dali's theory of paranoia outlined in "L'ane pourri" This was the only full-length article that addressed visual art in the first two issues of the magazine." (pg 288)

Synchromism

Synchromism, art movement begun by American painters Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright in 1913–14 that focused on colour. At the time, the two artists were living in Paris, painting abstract works they called “synchromies.” In a 1916 statement on Synchromism, Macdonald-Wright described how he purified his paintings to create effects through rhythmic colour forms, explaining that “color, in order to function significantly, must be used as an abstract medium.” Although the multicoloured forms in their paintings strongly resembled the whirling circles of theOrphist paintings of Robert Delaunay and František Kupka, Russell and Macdonald-Wright claimed that their work was original.

In 1913 the first Synchromist painting, Russell’s Synchromy in Green, was exhibited at the Paris Salon des Indépendants. In the same year, the Synchromists held their first exhibition, in Munich, followed by one in Paris at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. In March 1914 their works were shown at the Carroll Gallery, New York City. Synchromism briefly attracted several American painters, among them Thomas Hart Benton, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Andrew Dasburg. Although Russell and Macdonald-Wright abandoned Synchromism about 1919, returning to representational works, they were important pioneers of American abstract art.

A basic tenet of synchromism is that color can be arranged or orchestrated in much the same way that notes of a symphony are arranged by composers. This harmonious arrangement of colors and shapes produces experiential results similar to that of listening to well balanced orchestral compositions.

Artist ==> Morgan Russell (January 25, 1886 - May 29, 1953) was a U.S. abstract painter. He was born and raised in New York City in 1886. He was, along with artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the founder of Synchromism an important modernist movement in early 20th century art.

Section D'or

The Section d'Or ("Golden Section" in French), also known as Groupe de Puteaux or Puteaux Group, was a collective of painters and critics associated with an offshoot of Cubism known as Orphism.
 Many of these painters retained only the superficial appearance of Cubism, the geometrical fragmentation of the painted surface, and later turned in opposite directions, some going back to traditional formulae, while others were borne away by abstract currents or Dada experiments, but the unity of their search was based on a common admiration for Cézanne and his constructive lesson. The initiative and the title of this exhibition, which created a considerable stir, were due to the painter and engraver Jacques Villon. In his studio at Puteaux, near Paris, a number of artists passionately interested in problems of rhythm and proportion met on Sunday afternoons, among them the two theoreticians of Cubism, Gleizes and Metzinger, Picabia, Léger La Fresnaye, as well as the poets Paul Fort, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Jean Cocteau and Joachim Gasquet. Villon developed his theory of vision by pyramids, taken from Leonardo da Vinci, and suggested during these meetings the title of 'Section d'Or', borrowed from the treatise of the Bolognese monk Luca Pacioli, The Divine Proportion, published in Venice in 1509 and illustrated by Leonardo himself. 


Formulated by Vitruvius and taken up again during the Renaissance, the golden section or divine proportion (or gate of harmony) is the ideal relation between two magnitudes, expressed numerically as and demonstrated in many masterpieces of different arts, applied consciously or, more often, by instinct. 'There is,' Voltaire said, 'a hidden geometry in all the arts that the hand produces.' Although the golden section was not the only constant to which the Cubists referred for the mathematical organization of their canvas, it reflected the profound need for order and measure that they felt more through sensibility and reason than as a result of calculation. Distorted by the incomprehension or bad faith of critics, the 'Section d'Or' exhibition met with immense avant-garde success in France and abroad, and constituted a general rally under the sign of Cézannian architecture and geometrical discipline.

Artist ==> Albert Gleizes (Paris, 8 December 1881 – Avignon, 23 June 1953), was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists. He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art.

DADA

Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later movements including Surrealism.

   According to its proponents, Dada was not art; it was anti-art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strives to have no meaning--interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada offends. Perhaps it is then ironic that Dada is an influential movement in Modern art. Dada became a commentary on art and the world, thus becoming art itself.

   The artists of the Dada movement had become disillusioned by art, art history and history in general. Many of them were veterans of World War I and had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. Thus they became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world (they thought that nothing mankind had achieved was worthwhile, not even art), and created art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dada is nonsense. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dada was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their world was turned upside down.


"Dada does not mean anything.. We read in the papers that the Negroes of the Kroo race call the tail of the sacred cow: dada. A cube, and a mother, in certain regions of Italy, are called: Dada. The word for a hobby-horse, a children's nurse, a double affirmative in Russian and Rumanian, is also: Dada." 
- Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifestov


Artist ==> Jean Arp/ Hans Arp
Arp was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916. 

Arp was born in Strasbourg. The son of a French mother and a German father, he was born during the period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen in German) after it had been returned to Germany by France. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law determined that his name become Jean.


Library Source: "The Artwork- Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and DADA in Paris" /George Baker


"The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death...To death, to death, to death. The only thing that doesn't die is money, it just leaves on trips. - Francis Picabia, Manifeste Cannibale Dada, 1920" (p95)

(Tableu Dada I/Picabia) " Instead of a painting, thought Picabia, he would present a living creature, a live monkey, as a work of art, escaping thereby the paralysis of representation, the inert lifelessness of the aesthetic for the immediacy and movement of life itself. No monkeys, however, presented themselves for the task. In the end, Picabia was forced to go to the toy store instead of the pet store, where he purchased a stuffed monkey, a monkey that soon found itself attached to the center of an otherwise blank canvas. Words were scrawled around this monkey. "Natures mortes", Picabia inscribed it, reversing his original title. "Still lifes", the painting declaimed, and immediately explained itself, with words running like obscenities across the expanse of a schoolboy's desk: Portrait of Cézanne, Portrait of Rembrandt, Portrait of Renoir." Deadbeats" (p99)


"It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form."- Georges Bataille (p199)

Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants and native German artists. Der Blaue Reiter was a movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded the previous decade in 1905.

Der Blaue Reiter was formed in 1911 in Munich as a loose association of painters led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. They shared an interest in abstracted forms and prismatic colors, which, they felt, had spiritual values that could counteract the corruption and materialism of their age. The flattened perspective and reductive forms of woodcut helped put the artists, especially Kandinsky, on the path toward abstraction in their painting.

The name Blaue Reiter (“blue rider”) refers to a key motif in Kandinsky’s work: the horse and rider, which was for him a symbol for moving beyond realistic representation. The horse was also a prominent subject in Marc’s work, which centered on animals as symbols of rebirth.

Artist => Wassily Kandinsky

In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933.

Futurism

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city. 


Futurism came into being with the appearance of a manifesto published by the poet Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro. It was the very first manifesto of this kind. 
Futurism was inspired by the development of Cubism and went beyond its techniques. The Futurist painters made the rhythm of their repetitions of lines. Inspired by some photographic experiments, they were breaking motion into small sequences, and using the wide range of angles within a given time-frame all aimed to incorporate the dimension of time within the picture. Brilliant colors and flowing brush strokes also additionally were creating the illusion of movement. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.
Futurists mixed activism and artistic research. They organized events that caused scandal. Everything was there to help them to glorify Italy and lead their country into the age of modernity. Certain Futurists vehemently promoted themselves to try to join forces with the Fascists, who were coming to power at the time. But Mussolini showed a preference for the Novecento Italiano, movement of artists who identified with the classical order and Italian heritage.
Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries, France and most notably Russia. Close to Futurism with its inspirations and motivations was Precisionism, an important development of American Modernism. 

   Although Futurism itself is now regarded as extinct, having died out during the 1920s, powerful echoes of Marinetti's thought, still remain in modern, popular culture and art. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism. 


Artist => Carlo Carra

Italian artist who participated to futurism on 1910s. He had a metaphsyical understanding of painting.


Library Source => "Futurism" / Caroline Tisdall


"Italian futurism was the first cultural movement of the twentieth century to aim directly and deliberately at a mass audience. To do so it made use of every available means and medium, and invented others beside. It was a hectic herald of the recurrent concern in the art of our times to equate art and life, an equation which still remains unresolved. But in the heady years which led up to and into the First World War the small group of writers, artists and musicians who called themselves the Italian Futurists set out to do more than that. Their aim and their claim was to transform the mentality of an anachronistic society. Marinetti and his friends were determined to prepare Italy for what seemed to be the great adventure of modern times: 'What we want to do is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible.'" (pg 7)
"The roots of Futurism are a tangled web of turn-of-the-century political, cultural and philosophical currents that come to light, unacknowledged, in 'The Founding and Manifesto'. Few, if any, of the ideas in it are totally original. Violence, war, anarchy, nationalism, the cult of the superman, glorification of urban life, of technology and of spee, together with hatred of the past and scorn of academic value, had all been voiced before. What was new was the way in which they were all brought together and synthesized into one inflammatory cultural document ripe for distribution." (pg 17)
"To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere." (pg33)

(speed of a motorcycle)

Die Brücke

Die brücke means "the bridge" in German. Die Brücke is sometimes compared to the Fauves. Both movements shared interests in primitivist art. Both shared an interest in the expressing of extreme emotion through high-keyed color that was very often non-naturalistic. Both movements employed a drawing technique that was crude, and both groups shared an antipathy to complete abstraction. The Die Brücke artists' emotionally agitated paintings of city streets and sexually charged events transpiring in country settings make their French counterparts, the Fauves, seem tame by comparison.


Die Brucke was the association of artist expressionists from Dresden, Germany. Their first exhibition was held in 1906.Die Brucke made use of a technique that was controlled, intentionally unsophisticated and crude, developing a style hallmarked by expressive distortions and emphases. Die Brucke artists often used color similar to the Fauves, and they were also influenced by art form from Africa and Oceania. 


Some of the painters in the group sympathized with the revolutionary socialism of the day and drew inspiration from Van Gogh's ideas on artists' communities. Die Brucke expressionists believed that their social criticism of the ugliness of modern life could lead to a new and better future. 


Fritz Bleyl => The one of the starters of the movement.

Les fauves

(Fauvism) which means "the wild beasts in French, a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions.


Fauvism has its roots in the post-impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin. It was his use of symbolic colour that pushed art towards the style of Fauvism. Gauguin proposed that colour had a symbolic vocabulary which could be used to visually translate a range of emotions. In 'Vision after the Sermon' where Gauguin depicts Jacob wrestling with an angel, he paints the background a flat red to emphasise the mood and subject of the sermon: Jacob's spiritual battle fought in a blood red field of combat. Gauguin believed that colour had a mystical quality that could express our feelings about a subject rather than simply describe a scene. By breaking the established descriptive role that colour had in painting, he inspired the younger artists of his day to experiment with new possibilities for colour in art.


2 artists => Matisse & Derain


At the start of the 20th century, two young artists, Henri Matisse and André Derain formed the basis of a group of painters who enjoyed painting pictures with outrageously bold colours. The group were nicknamed 'Les Fauves' which meant 'wild beasts' in French. Their title was coined by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles who was amused by the exaggerated colour in their art. At the Salon d'automne of 1905 he entered a gallery where Les Fauves were exhibiting their paintings. Surprised by the contrast with a typical renaissance sculpture that stood in the centre of this room, he exclaimed with irony, "Donatello au mileau des fauves!" ( Donatello in the middle of the wild beasts! ). The name stuck.

(by Matisse)

(by Derain)

Library Source: "Les Fauves, a Sourcebook" /Russell T. Clement


"The initial contacts that led eventually  to the creation of Fauvism date to 1892. In that year, Henri Natisse, 22 years old and having just spent his first year in Paris in the stifling and frustrating atmosphere of William Adolfe, Bouguereau's class at l'Académie Julian, joined the studio of celebrated symbolist Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Ironically, Bouguereau's vast studio on the Left Bank, in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, was taken over after his death in 1905 by the Fauve painter Othan Friest." (introduction xiii)